Christmas In A Small Town. Kristina Knight

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СКАЧАТЬ your customers with the limited menu in another few days.” She turned back to Camden. “So you want that glass, honey?”

      “Sure.” As much as she wanted to get out of this dress, she still hadn’t figured out what she was going to say to Calvin and Bonita when she showed up on their doorstep.

      Hi, how’ve you been? seemed a little too breezy, especially as she hadn’t seen them in more than a decade. She wasn’t up to spilling the whole sordid tale about her mother’s expectations, the life she’d hated and the colossal mistake she’d made when she accepted Grant’s proposal. Not yet.

      Juanita delivered the glass of wine, and Camden took a sip. It glided down her throat, tasting sweet and soothing. So much better than the beer. She hooked her heel around the rung of one of the bar stools and settled herself at the bar.

      Calling her grandparents was probably the best next step, but what if they were already asleep? Or didn’t want to see her? She’d sent Christmas and birthday cards, had invited them to her graduations, but other than that, her grandparents were strangers to her over these past few long years. All she knew about them was that they were far away from Kansas City. And that there was no love lost between her father’s parents and his former wife.

      This was childish, wasn’t it? Running away from her problems instead of facing up to them wouldn’t solve anything. But what was done was done, and she was too exhausted to drive all the way back to Kansas City tonight. Maybe she should get a hotel room and wait until the morning to see her grandparents.

      “You seem a little lost,” a man suddenly said beside her.

      Camden took another sip of her wine, weighing her options. “No, I have the directions. Thanks, though.”

      If she went to a hotel, chances were she would talk herself out of visiting Calvin and Bonita at all.

      If she drove back to Kansas City, chances were her mother would convince her Grant would change his ways once they were married.

      She didn’t want to be married to Grant. Not because it would cement her stepfather’s place at the firm, and not because Grant wanted a former beauty queen on his arm at political events. She didn’t want to be married to Grant. At all.

      For the first time since she found Grant and Heather in the closet, Camden felt as if she could breathe. She didn’t want to be married to Grant. That was settled.

      “A woman doesn’t walk into a bar wearing a designer wedding gown, alone, without being a little lost,” the man said, and there was a teasing note in his deep voice.

      “I don’t want to be married,” Camden said, testing how the words sounded when spoken aloud. No twinge of anxiety. No guilt. She didn’t want to be married. “I didn’t pick out this monstrosity of a dress, and I didn’t pick the groom, but I am picking where I’m going from here. And I’m not going down the aisle.”

      “That’s good, since we don’t seem to have an aisle.” The words seemed to rumble from his chest, vibrating between them and making the little hairs on her arm stand up. Weird. Camden rubbed her hand along her arm, and the engagement ring she’d forgotten to take off winked at her in the dim light.

      “Wow,” he said, taking her hand in his and letting the light catch the different facets of the three-carat ring from Tiffany & Co. Camden kept her focus on the half-full glass before her. Her skin tingled where his hand held hers, and tension set off butterflies in her stomach. Camden snatched her hand away. How could she have forgotten the ring? And how could she have a physical reaction like this to a guy she’d known for only a minute? Her stomach never got jumpy like this with Grant. At best, she was lukewarm around him, but suddenly, the bar seemed hot and humid, as if hundreds of people were crowded into it on a steamy summer day. Not a handful of people on a chilly fall night.

      “Nice rock,” he said, leaning against the bar, facing the big dance floor she had crossed only a few minutes ago. Camden kept her focus on the wineglass. She wasn’t interested in marrying the man she’d been engaged to for the last few months, and she wasn’t interested in flirting with the man who’d sidled up next to her in this bar.

      “I didn’t pick it out.” Now, where had that come from? She’d been blown away by the ring when Grant presented it to her back in the summer. Sure, it was heavy on her hand, and it snagged on everything. But it—

      No, Camden shut down that train of thought. Yes, Grant had bought the ring for her. But Grant had also been screwing her maid of honor in a closet about fifteen minutes before they were supposed to pledge their love—or at least fidelity—to one another. So...she had no reason to feel sentimental about this ring or guilty that she was happy she could now take it off and never wear it again.

      Camden wasn’t quite sure what she wanted, but she knew diving into a flirtation with a stranger wouldn’t help her figure it out. She needed to focus.

      “It’s a nice-looking dress, though.”

      “Not my style.”

      “I find that hard to believe. You wear it too well.”

      Because she’d been trained to wear it well. Her mother had started her on the pageant circuit when she was nine, and after her father died, the pageants had become almost weekly occurrences. Still, having a stranger comment on her appearance was nice. Maybe a little stalkery, but nice. “Yeah, well, it’s not like it takes a special set of skills to wear designer clothing.”

      “I don’t know about that.”

      Okay, that upped the stalker level a little too high. She was not going to let some cowboy in a small town take her to his trailer just because she’d walked out on her old life.

      “I’m going to finish this glass of wine and be on my way. You can scurry back over to your buddies now and tell them what a hateful witch I am.”

      “You don’t seem all that hateful. Maybe a little sad. But not hateful.” His voice was kind, kinder than she probably deserved after walking away from everything and everyone the way she had done. But she still wasn’t letting a stranger talk her into bed. No matter how sexy his voice sounded in the darkened bar. “You’re wearing a ring you didn’t pick out, and a dress that isn’t your style. Seems to me like this has not been your day.”

      “Try lifetime,” she said and twirled the stem of the wineglass between her fingers. And she was not going to keep talking to a perfect stranger about her life. She was not feeling like herself, but she wasn’t completely desperate.

      “How much do I owe you?” she asked Merle, who was looking from Camden to the man at the bar and back again.

      “Ten dollars,” the older man said.

      “I’ll take care of it.”

      “I pay my own bills,” Camden said and turned to look at the man standing beside her.

      He was tall, built like a football player. His skin was a rich brown, and there were golden flecks in his brown eyes.

      And she knew him.

      He was taller than she remembered. His shoulders wider. His voice deeper. But the laughter in the gaze was the same, as was the crooked tilt to his mouth. Camden clapped her hand over her mouth. Oh, God, she wanted to sink through the floor of the bar.

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